Kalsec® is the leading global producer of natural spice and herb flavor extracts, colors, antioxidants, and advanced hop products for the food and beverage industry. Kalsec®’s high-quality, innovative ingredient solutions enable their customers to improve the taste, appearance and shelf-life of a highly diverse range of end products.

In an effort to develop a new assay for capsaicinoids that would address the shortcomings of their legacy HPLC-UV/FLR approach, Kalsec®’s Analytical R&D laboratory successfully implemented a new method utilizing UltraPerformance Liquid Chromatography (UPLC) separation coupled with ACQUITY QDa mass detection.

As a result of implementing this new approach to sample analyses, the company has noted several scientific and operational benefits, including:

The UPLC-MS based capsaicinoids assay can be completed in 4 minutes compared to the legacy HPLC-UV/FLR method which required 15 minutes – a 73% reduction in run time.

The inclusion of mass detection in the new method has improved sensitivity, enabling the quantitation of capsaicinoids present at very low levels in some of the formulations.

Co-eluting analytes that had appeared as single peaks and could have been missed by optical detection are now discernible.

Variances to the capsicum extracts composition encountered during manufacturing can now be investigated and adjusted more rapidly, helping to ensure product consistency and quality.